My Year of Flops (30 page)

Tim:
Tell me, what are your two sides?

Alvin:
The enforcer and the maniac.

Tim:
Who do we have the honor of addressing?

Alvin:
You've never met the maniac.

Hauser delivers the “enforcer and the maniac” line with irresistible lunatic abandon. A veteran of countless shitty B-movies, Hauser looks and acts like the demon spawn of Gary Busey and Rutger Hauer. It's a performance pitched at just the right level of frothing hysteria.

I was even won over by O'Neal's wan lead performance. As a malicious cosmic joke, Mailer undercuts his lead actor at every turn. He made the protagonist a passive, weak-willed shell of a man who turns white with fright at the first sign of danger, then cast the great tough-guy character actor Lawrence Tierney as O'Neal's rough-hewn dad, so O'Neal would look even more effete by comparison.

The apex/nadir of O'Neal's performance comes when he reads a horrifying letter and cries out, “Oh, God! Oh, man!” over and over while the camera swirls dementedly around him. O'Neal reportedly begged Mailer to cut out the scene to make himself look like less of a jackass amateur, but Mailer refused, cuz nobody tells Norman fucking Mailer what to do. Then Mailer screwed all of O'Neal's ex-wives simultaneously, did elephant tranquilizers, and beat a grizzly bear to death with his bare fists. Or so I would imagine.

Tough Guys Don't Dance
works best as a darkly comic, horror-tinged melodrama about the emptiness of excess and the soul-crushing costs of pursuing mindless pleasure. Like Godard's
Weekend,
it's about the pleasuring of the body as the death of the spirit, about the agonizing
moment when sex, drugs, and wild excess stop feeling like heaven and begin to feel like hell. It's populated by some of the most repellent hedonists this side of
Rules Of Attraction,
and written and directed with tongue firmly in cheek.

When I look back at the first half of this essay, I want to punch the fey asshole who wrote it right in his smug fucking face. Then, after he gradually regains consciousness, we can down some Jack and go out looking for trouble. Oh, God! Oh, man! Oh, God! Oh, man! I think Mailer, that crafty old dog, may just be having his wicked way with my fragile psyche after all.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco Turned Secret Success

Dominant-Paradigm-Subverting Case File #137: Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Originally Posted May 13, 2009

When I told my editor Keith that I was thinking of writing about Gus Van Sant's 1993 comedy
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
for My Year Of Flops, he mentioned that he'd read almost all Tom Robbins' books, then realized that he didn't particularly like them. When I asked why, he shrugged. “Eh, I was in college.”

I never went through a Tom Robbins phase, but I have my own mini-pantheon of writers I will forever associate with college. For eternally status-conscious undergraduates, the books they read—or at least litter artfully around their living spaces, in hopes that peers (read: girls) will notice them and be impressed—play a big role in defining themselves. Heck, the fact that they read at all—instead of just watching fucking bullshit reality television like the sheep in [insert name of dorm/frat/sorority we don't care for]—plays a big role in how their self-images are forged.

So every year, a new group of freshmen establish their individuality, disdain for conformity, and rapacious intellectual curiosity—they're
seekers
—by reading all the books they're supposed to. They're looking for road maps for life, for mentors and life lessons from the sages their older brothers and sisters and parents and cool uncles followed before them, men and women with magical names like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller and Malcolm X and James Baldwin and Tom Robbins. They're looking to them as keys that open doors to dangerous ideas and exciting new adult worlds.

Such college students are rebels steeped in tradition, or at least the tradition of rebellion. Accordingly, much of the literature they gravitate toward is synonymous with scenes, countercultures, movements, and attractive people who bathe less often than they should and drink and smoke pot and fuck indiscriminately. There's a grungy glamour to so much of our extracurricular freshmen reading, and it's rooted in the cult of personality of writers like Tom Robbins.

Much of what attracts us as young people in search of an identity boils down to sex. By “we,” I of course mean “me.” We're drawn like Kennedys to an open bar by the aura of sex, danger, kink, and transgression that clings to the oeuvres of artists like Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Robbins. I could tell you I was originally intrigued by
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
because it is an adaptation of a cult novel by a major filmmaker, but the truth is, I really just wanted to see lesbians lesbianing it up in a sapphic Western wonderland.

I was a college freshman, appropriately enough, when I saw
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
on videotape in 1994. It would be a year before I lived in a co-op myself, but I was looking for a cinematic contact high from the drugs, groovy vibes, and sexual free-for-all of the era it depicted. But mainly, I hoped to see hot chicks getting it on. My high ideals were both at odds with my baser instincts and perfectly in sync with them.

“The sur-
prise
of Sissy Hankshaw is that she did not grow up a neurotic
disaster,
” Tom Robbins drawls in the narration that opens
the film, as a pint-sized incarnation of a protagonist who will grow up to be Uma Thurman blows out her birthday candles while being fêted by a trio of Eisenhower-era suburban grotesques. The period detail is assaultive, the performances cartoonish, and the narration self-consciously wacky.

The heroine of
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
was born with a genetic abnormality: freakishly large thumbs that will someday allow her to become the world's greatest hitchhiker. Her parents (played by counterculture icon Ken Kesey and Grace Zabriskie) want their daughter to live a normal life. But Sissy Hankshaw quickly becomes fixated on hitchhiking as a way of life, a ticket outta Squaresville and onto the holy open road.

After getting picked up by a sharp-dressed black man, Sissy opines on the virtues of American cheese (“It's the king of road food”) and talks cosmically of embodying “the spirit and heart of hitchhiking. I have the rhythms of the universe inside me. I'm in a state of grace.” She rattles on and on in language that clings to the page and stubbornly refuses to become cinematic: “You may say that my pleasure in Indianhood and my passion for car travel might be incongruous, if not mutually exclusive. But after all, the first car that ever stopped for me had been named after the great chief of the Ottawa.”

In New York City, far from her spiritual home on the highways and byways of our great country, Sissy meets up with mentor the Countess, a feminine-hygiene magnate played by John Hurt. The Countess first tries to get Sissy to lose her virginity to a Mohawk Indian watercolorist played by Keanu Reeves, but when that proves a bust, the Countess tells her to travel to the Rubber Rose Ranch, a “beauty farm” named after a popular line of douches, so Sissy can make a triumphant return to modeling in a feminine-hygiene ad costarring some legendary whooping cranes.

At the Rubber Rose Ranch, a civil war has broken out between the overly coiffed, sweet-smelling forces of repression and a group of saucy sapphic sensualists who call themselves Cowgirls and rebel against the narrow-minded bourgeoisie by smoking pot, taking peyote,
having mind-blowing orgasms, and not washing their vaginas. Seriously. In
Blues,
the scatological is political; the film is fixated on the ideological ramifications of body odor. The Countess' obsession with purging women of their vaginal odors is representative of society denying women their sexuality, independence, and autonomy. The Cowgirls, however, are fierce and untamed: wild, natural creatures free to explore their passions and impulses, forces of nature that can't be controlled, conquered, or co-opted.

I didn't remember much about
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
from my first viewing, beyond its tragic dearth of hot lesbian action, but I do remember being mightily impressed by Rain Phoenix as Bonanza Jellybean, Sissy's love interest and the leader of the Cowgirls. Looking back, I wonder exactly what kind of crack I was smoking in 1994, because Phoenix is fucking terrible here. Hilary Duff terrible. Malin Akerman in
Watchmen
terrible.

A brilliant, seasoned actor like John Hurt can barely wrap his lips around this stilted, overwritten dialogue, so you can imagine how awful the following lines sound when delivered in a Keanu Reeves–like monotone by a rank amateur like Phoenix:

The elaborate, almost sadistic wordiness of those phrases might have a pleasing, perverse rhythm in print, but on-screen, they groan and lumber, secretly beckoning audiences to check their watches and contemplate dinner plans. Robbins' loopy poetry and stoner lyricism died somewhere in the fraught journey between page and screen.
Whimsy has a way of becoming grotesque when rendered in the literal-minded vocabulary of film.

Ah, but back to the plot. At the Rubber Rose Ranch, Sissy falls in love with Jellybean, but Sissy's allegiances are divided between her new lover and her old mentor. Looking to get away from the craziness, she makes a spiritual journey to visit a mysterious figure known only as “the Chink,” played by Pat Morita. Morita is either a profound mystic or a horny old mountain goat. Possibly both. There's a Chauncey Gardiner–like mock profundity to his homemade aphorisms. Or they're bullshit. Or they're simultaneously bogus
and
profound. Free your mind, square! Forget bullshit fake dichotomies!

In
Blues,
the spiritual is wrapped up in the physical, which is wrapped up in the scatological, and everything is a cosmic joke. The Chink treats the world like a perverse laugh. His belief system succinctly boils down to, “Ha ha, ho ho, hee hee.” Morita's sham mystic gets Sissy high, then has sex with her. That's life: You save yourself for Keanu Reeves and end up losing your virginity to Arnold from
Happy Days.

Morita plays the character with an exquisitely light touch, as an amiable goof. If only the film had followed suit. Instead,
Blues
stumbles when it should skip. Morita's performance and k.d. lang's dreamy music both seem to belong in a different version of
Blues,
one that doesn't suck.

Blues
goes from bad to worse when Sissy accidentally injures the Countess with her gargantuan thumb. In the groan-inducing words of Robbins' narration, “A sorrowful Sissy had her thumbs transport her to the one person she knew who could disarm her. Or should we say, de
-thumb
her.” Thurman has her glorious thumbs reduced to normal size and loses her mojo in the process.

Meanwhile, back at the Rubber Rose Ranch, the Cowgirls have taken the whooping cranes—the beauty ranch's pride and joy—as hostages and are feeding them peyote to keep them from becoming pawns in the Countess' tawdry empire of shame and repression.

People sometimes complain about terrible adaptations ruining great books, to which the common and proper retort is that books will always exist as autonomous, untainted entities.
Blues
proves especially resilient; no matter how badly Van Sant tries to translate Robbins' text into cinematic form, it clings to its literary roots. It simply will not become a movie. In spite of Van Sant's considerable talent,
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
feels throughout like the world's most elaborate, expensive staged reading.